How to determine the right tool to move from concept to functional design

Every designer has their own workflow when starting a new project, even if it’s only loosely defined in their head. A typical Web project goes through a variety of steps from inception to launch, with a lot of moving parts throughout the cycle. Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks and even Web browsers themselves are available to aid you in your work. But with so many choices, how do you determine the right tool to move from concept to functional design?

Over the years, Joshua Bullock has come to rely on Adobe Fireworks as the main workhorse among his design applications. It’s built from the ground up to create screen-ready graphics; it’s object-oriented by design; and it’s lightning fast for creating UI elements. While Photoshop has made great strides lately by adding some vector support, it simply has not been able to match the speed and reusability of Fireworks for production work. Read on to get a glimpse of his project workflow (sketches ? wireframes ? graphic comps ? export) and to see how Fireworks fits into these different stages.